The 2014 college football season marks the dawn of the playoff era as the BCS system gives way to the College Football Playoff.

The teams that play in the national semifinals will be selected by a committee, and regardless of what the rules say, I think it's doubtful that any team from what's now known as the "Group of Five" (aka the have-nots) will get to play in a semifinal game.

But to appease everyone, the powers that be determined that the highest-ranked champion from all the conferences in the Group of Five will get a guaranteed bid to one of the six big-money College Football Playoff bowls.

From where we stand right now -- in January 2014 -- there's a decent chance that the Mountain West champion might get to send a representative to a CFB bowl.

“From top to bottom, the strongest of those five conferences is the Mountain West,” said Brandon Pertner, CEO of Phil Steele Publications, which publishes the popular college football preview magazine of the same name every summer. “That’s probably a surprise considering that the American Athletic Conference had a BCS winner this year (in UCF), but they will lose Louisville to the ACC and have become a glorified C-USA.

“The Mountain West is the most stable and underrated of those five conferences.”

Even without Chris Petersen, Pertner believes Boise State will be an eight to 10 win team, and says that after four-straight bowl appearances, San Diego State has shown that it’s one of the top tier Mountain West teams too.

Utah State and Fresno State round off Pertner’s list of the best teams in the Mountain West.

The Aztecs haven’t done enough to establish themselves as early favorite MWC champions, but Pertner predicts that they’ll be an eight or nine win team in 2014, and could be a “breakthrough Mountain West championship team if they catch a couple of breaks.”

“They’ll miss Adam Muema, but the key to their 2013 season was that they got much better quarterback play down the stretch,” Pertner said. “Quinn Kaehler will only get better in his second year. And they always field solid defenses.”